


nothing gold can stay;

by darkenergies



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Módào Zǔshī Fusion, Angst, Gen, mdzs background/glossary also in author's note so mdzs knowledge not needed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:29:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27377239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkenergies/pseuds/darkenergies
Summary: “Just let go,” Atsumu repeats, “Tell the world I defected. From now on, no matter what I do, it will have nothing to do with the Inarizaki Sect.”A Miya twins MDZS AU for Haikyuu Angst Week Day 4: broken promises, death, sacrifice.
Relationships: Miya Atsumu & Miya Osamu
Comments: 4
Kudos: 34
Collections: Haikyuu Angst Week 2020





	nothing gold can stay;

**Author's Note:**

> CWs (in addition to MCD tag): minor character death; mild violence and gore; allusions to war, necromancy, ghosts, cannibalism, mental breakdown consistent with or milder than MDZS canon.
> 
> Familiarity with the MDZS canon will 100% be useful and add more pain but is not strictly necessary for understanding, I think. The sacrifice prompt will definitely hit harder with context, though. For anyone who doesn’t know MDZS already, I did try to avoid too much Chinese terminology here as Haikyuu is Japanese, but some things were inevitable given the _xianxia_ context of MDZS. To help you out, I have:  
> -[A glossary of terms/ideas I refer to in this fic](https://privatter.net/p/6640034) (no major MDZS spoilers)  
> -[Additional context for extra pain](https://privatter.net/p/6640038) (heavy MDZS spoilers, though written in terms of the characters in this fic; password is "yes" in all lowercase just to check that you're fine with spoilers!)

“There’s no need to protect me. Just let go.”

Osamu’s heart sinks. He lowers his sword, maneuvers it to point at the body covered in talismans on the floor behind his brother instead. A hoarse whisper: “...What?”

“Just let go,” Atsumu repeats, “Tell the world I defected. From now on, no matter what I do, it will have nothing to do with the Inarizaki Sect.”

Osamu drops his sword on the stone floor with a loud clatter in favor of stalking closer to Atsumu and grabbing the front of his (rough, homespun, far lower in quality than what they’d grown up with) robes. “Are you fucking kidding me.” It’s a statement, not a question.

He remembers a sunny afternoon, one of the last before everything had well and truly gone to shit. Two pairs of bare feet hovering inches above a muddy lotus pond. Atsumu had slung an arm around Osamu’s shoulder, laughing, and declared the two of them the twin prides of Inarizaki, strong enough together to rival the top three cultivators of their generation. It had felt like a promise.

“This far for a bunch of war refugees? Do you have a fucking savior complex or something?” Osamu hisses, an inch away from full-out yelling, “What happened to the Miya twins taking the cultivation world by storm? What happened to sticking by each other’s side, no matter who ended up as sect leader?”

Atsumu just stares at him sadly, resigned in a way that Osamu has never seen before. What _happened_ to his obnoxious, ambitious brother? Even just a few years ago, when Osamu had finally stumbled across him after months of searching, Atsumu had a hint of his old arrogance about him. It had been a cold and apathetic kind of arrogance, a massive contrast to the bright and vivacious Atsumu who yelled at any underperforming disciples and called them scrubs that Osamu remembered from childhood, but the casual confidence in his ability was something Osamu could recognize anywhere. The Atsumu in front of him now doesn’t have even that.

(Osamu pushes down the growing feeling that a confrontation exactly like this had probably been inevitable ever since he and Sakusa Kiyoomi found Atsumu in that remote courier station with a creepy fucking ghost baby crawling around his legs, twirling a black flute in his hands and dispassionately watching a man cannibalize himself, surrounded by the near-oppressive chill of resentful energy. At the time, Osamu was simply too happy to have finally found his brother. But the way Atsumu had coldly called Sakusa by his last name and an honorific instead of teasing him with an overly-familiar nickname, in hindsight, should have been a clue.)

“You’ve done well as sect leader, Osamu. You don’t need me.” Atsumu looks off to the side. “The world doesn’t need the Miya twins anymore.”

Osamu’s hand is still fisted in Atsumu’s robes and he roughly hauls his brother up, even closer to his face. “What the literal fuck are you trying to say, Atsumu.”

“I mean that you should start considering yourself an only child!” Atsumu yells.

If those were any other words, Osamu probably would have felt relieved to hear Atsumu actually yelling at him again. Proof that the brother Osamu once knew better than the back of his own hand was still somewhere inside this Atsumu-shaped shell of a person.

Instead, Osamu drops Atsumu onto the hard ground in shock.

Atsumu pushes himself up to sitting, red flashing briefly across his golden eyes. “Can’t you just fucking _listen_ , Osamu? I already said that I’m leaving the Inarizaki Sect! And you know that means I have to renounce the Miya name as well since they run the whole damn thing! Strike me from the family records! Let me be nameless! Nothing I do in the future can reflect on you or your sect!”

 _Our parents are dead._ Osamu wants to sob. _I’m only the sect leader because nearly every person in our sect was killed and then there was a war we needed to fight and I was the only Miya left alive because you were missing, presumed dead, for three months. Kita was the only other survivor I found. And then you came back only to leave again._

But they’ve never been good at just talking through their arguments. Osamu picks Atsumu up by the front of his robes again, slams him into the cave wall. “You stubborn fucking idiot!” Osamu screams into his brother’s face, “I never even wanted to be sect leader without you by my side! But _you_ decided to abandon our family! So fuck you! Be miserable living your dumb fucking life in this damp ass cave growing your stupid vegetables on this cursed fucking mountain, because in ten years _I’m_ going to be the one who rebuilt our sect and I’ll be so fucking happy you’ll be begging me to take you back!”

“Ten years? We’ll see who’s happier when we die!” Atsumu screams right back, “And it’ll be the one who doesn’t have the guilt of leaving behind the people who hid us and kept us alive and returned our parents’ remains weighing him down for the rest of his life!”

There’s something his twin isn’t telling him, something Atsumu is trying to hide behind his anger. Osamu can tell. Words can’t break a bond forged in the womb, and Atsumu wouldn’t leave him purely out of guilt about owing another group of people. There has to be something else. But he has no idea what he’s hiding, and in his brief moment of broken concentration, Atsumu manages to gain the upper hand and throw him across the cave.

Osamu picks himself up and, with a calmness he really doesn’t feel, retrieves his sword from where he’d dropped it on the floor to sheathe it. A few years ago, young and petty as they were, they would have kept fighting. But the Osamu now, weary and war-hardened and absolutely fucking sick of sect politics, knows this argument won’t go anywhere at the moment. He begins walking toward the exit of the cave; turns around once to see Atsumu lounging across a large flat rock, surrounded by smoky shadows, daring Osamu to come grab him again.

Deep breath. Osamu channels his best diplomatic Sect Leader Miya voice. “Atsumu.”

The pressing cold of resentful energy recedes slightly. Red eyes morph back into gold. Atsumu smirks, realizing he (sort of) won the fight. It doesn’t reach his eyes.

Osamu tries to keep his voice as level as he can. “I’ll return in three days for a formal duel,” he says. Then he turns and starts walking away before the ache in his chest can push its way out in tears. He feels sick even as he reaches the town at the base of the Burial Mounds and the air becomes lighter, almost as if a tendril of resentful energy decided to stay with him and wrap itself around his golden core.

Oh. His golden core.

Maybe, Osamu muses forlornly, he had been abandoned all the way back when he had returned from the celestial mountain, restored golden core thrumming in his lower abdomen, a little brighter and a little wilder than he remembered it. Until all his excitement about being able to cultivate again died when Atsumu broke his promise to meet up with him and Osamu began to understand the burden that had been placed on his shoulders alone.

He doesn’t really blame Atsumu, of course; he knows his brother had been captured. You can’t blame anyone for that. But it doesn’t make thinking about it hurt any less. And now this. Will his last memory of the brother he grew up with really be a fuzzy shape through a blindfold giving him a shove and telling him, _“Go on, your lazy ass can walk the rest of the way alone, right?”_

Three days later, Osamu leaves with a broken arm and his (never former, no matter what he or the world might say) twin’s blood staining his sword and all he can think is _why?_

~~If Osamu still sends packages of the food and supplies he can spare from rebuilding the Inarizaki Sect to the Burial Mounds, a desperate hand reaching across the chasm that Atsumu never takes, no one needs to know.~~

In the blur of thousands of yelling cultivators and at least as many skeletal corpses controlled by the haunting trill of Atsumu’s black flute, Osamu remembers three things.

The first is Atsumu, collapsed in front of him, trembling and crying, eyes glowing red, desperate notes of his flute played with shaking hands and broken with panicked whispers. _“...I can’t control it, I just can’t control it...”_

The second is Kita, bleeding out in his arms after taking a sword meant for Atsumu, bloodied hand gently cradling his face, gentle and stern and calm even surrounded by and facing his own death. _I’m sorry for leaving you too_ , his eyes say. _Believe in your strength._

The third is again Atsumu, releasing an unhinged scream that sends a wave of resentful energy thrumming through the area and a chill up Osamu’s spine, expression changing in what feels like slow motion from shocked disbelief at Kita’s death to resigned detachment to just...nothing. Osamu can pinpoint the exact moment the last tether of his brother’s sanity snaps and he suddenly _knows_ , with shocking clarity, that there’s no going back, that he just watched the last little ember of hope he still had snuff itself out.

Osamu meets his twin’s eyes, and for a moment, red eyes fade back to reveal gold. Atsumu looks at him with a watery smile and mouths three words across the mountain of dead they’re calling a battlefield.

 _Be happy, ‘Samu_.

A heartbeat. The army of corpses turns on its master. Osamu screams.

**Author's Note:**

> osamu bby u are so close to figuring it out...so close...so much closer than jc ever was…
> 
> worldbuilding notes: kita isn’t a 1-to-1 jyl analogy; i see him more as a close childhood friend who wasn’t great at cultivation and ended up being in more of an advisor/diplomat position! everyone else in inarizaki exists here but uh...they died. i didn’t want to put any hq team/characters in the position of the wens and i also didn’t want to deal with qiongqi path at all so please do not ask. i simply shoved atsumu (love) and miya twins and yunmeng shuangjie into a blender and this came out
> 
>  **[twitter](https://twitter.com/DARKENERGlES)** | **[cc](https://curiouscat.qa/darkenergies)**


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